


travelling north

by thnderchld



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Teen Pregnancy, i havent even finished the show yet i just, no one dies, want them to be happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 07:23:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16530053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thnderchld/pseuds/thnderchld
Summary: An AU where everyone is happy, and where Marina and Nano try to make ends meet away from it all.





	travelling north

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this all at 1AM so good fucking luck

The two of them drive North, him with the gun in his pocket and her with the life in her belly. He is watching the road and she is watching the sunset. For a moment his gaze flits to her, in time to see her red hair awash with heat from the dying day. She tips her head back, a mix of hurt and relief playing along her face.

Nano wonders if perhaps it should hurt him more, this venture of theirs. But if he starts thinking like that now, he’ll never stop driving.

Marina feels sick, she says. She’s leaning against the door, waiting for him and his shitty roadside McDonalds. Nano kisses her and hands her a paper bag of a burger and fries. Her eyes are bright as she sits with her feet up on the dashboard. “We need new names,” she says around a mouthful of lettuce and meat, “People will look for me.”

“How do I know you won’t duck tail and run back to them at the first second you can?”

Marina laughs quietly, popping open an apple juice. Then she stops, her lovely face turned toward the moon. A part of Nano’s mind thinks that they’ll need to find a motel. Their belongings are sparse enough- the hefty sum she stole from her father, as well as half of Nano’s latest paycheque.

(Nano remembers the way the kitchen the looked as he closed that last time- the hazy grey light of early morning, the envelope on the table. He imagines the sound of his brother breathing through the thin wall, remembers the strange emptiness of his chest)

“Should I feel bad?” Marina asks, eyes set on that moon, “I keep thinking that I should be. But I don’t.”

Nano shrugs but stays silent. She doesn’t say it, but he thinks Marina feels displeased. “I’ve spent my life trying to keep my brother safe. Look what good that did.”

He itches for a cigarette. Instead he watches Marina, face washed out in the yellow car light. “You chose me over your brother. Do you regret it?” He sees her slide a hand over the flat plane of her stomach, a thumb rubbing along the invisible presence that is That. That life. His life.

It could be so easy to say that she is ‘his girl’, so easy to see the people that gaze at her beauty and tell them that she’s his. But to do that would be to lie, and he can only imagine how her face would look. The slight dip between her eyebrows, the strong stare she would give him. Even now, looking so small and sad in the McDonalds parking lot, he knows that he cannot reach out, that she must always belong to her own soft sadness.

“You’re not sad about them, but you’re sad.”

She looks at him, and then it changes. She smiles wide, the tiny light in her eyes flickering on like he’s flicked a switch. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

They wake up in a field before nine. Nano feels as though he hasn’t slept at all, and Marina doesn’t look much better. He watches her wash her meds back with water, eating a bit of left over burger to chase the taste away. Then she looks at Nano, blue eyes open and happy. “Close your eyes, Nano.”

He does, and he feels her fingers wrap around his wrist. He wants to open his eyes, to see the way her fingers look against his darker skin. Instead, he does as she commands him. He feels paper beneath his fingers.

“Now point.” He hears a catch in her voice, and takes it as his cue to open his eyes. His finger is resting dangerously over a map, settled on a town in the Balkans. It’s pretty close to a capital city, and from Marina’s look he imagines it will have to be good enough.

“I can’t speak anything other than Spanish,” he says and she shakes her head. She reaches over and kisses him, her mouth still tasting of meat and ketchup.

“It doesn’t matter. We can live out our lives another way, free of language. We can get a farm with cows and sheep. We can open our doors to anyone who wants to taste your food.” She unbuttons her shirt so that the soft white of her stomach peeks out. “We can figure it out ourselves, teach ourselves how to live on our own.”

“You could really stand a life of only me.”

“It won’t only be you.” She looks away again, laughing. “Who would’ve thought that a pregnancy would be the thing to get me _free_ , not the other way around.”

They find a room in a shitty Bosnian hotel. In many ways, it makes Nano think of Spain. There’s the sharp heat, the fucked up government and the way people look at them. But they have enough money to buy a farm, enough money to get started on building a home, enough money to bring in the first few cattle.

This is a now or never endeavour. They need to make the crops work, and Nano is half wild with the terror of Marina hurting herself, especially now.

They manage to buy some farmland outside Mostar. The land is hard and sunbleached, but if his ancestors made it in the sharp hot hills of Spain, Nano can make it in the sharp hot hills of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

They buy a tent and the raw materials of wood and nails. Nano had enough foresight to bring a toolbox.

At night, they sit on top of the sleeping bag and peruse pages of Bosnian language guides. It’s a stupid thing, with 7 cases and words that seem like they will cut their mouths. Then they get to talking about other things, his hand resting idly over the slow swell of her belly.

“Are you scared?” he asks and she laughs, the noise soft and light.

“I’m terrified. I hurt all the time, and I’m always on the verge of throwing up, and I don’t know what I’ll do when I outgrow my clothes.” She has always been small, but now the gentle rise of her pregnancy is starting to show through her singlets.

“You’re not alone. You have me.”

Marina smiles and turns her face away, forever caught in that space between shyness and revealing herself. She changes the subject. “I went to the market today. Started talking to a woman in one of the tourist shops, they might have a place for me.”

Nano doesn’t like the thought of Marina working desperately for the right to have her child in these lands. She knows that her parents’ discovery would send Nano far from her, and she doesn’t want to lose him again.

They talk about baby names. No way are they calling it Samuel.

They build a house out of wood and slats of brick. Marina pushes herself more than she should, hammering down the foundations of the life they’re building together. He can’t find the will to stop her though- not when she is grinning and laughing and joking with the thick taste of freedom on her tongue.

They plant potatoes a few weeks before the Winter comes. Marina manages to make some friends at the Mostar park, on the Bosnian side. They invite her into their home and they teach her the things that no one will dare to teach her. They teach her how to sew baby clothes. They show her how to bargain for cribs and strollers. They teach her how to edge toward okay.

“It’s a girl. I know it is.” Nano’s head is resting on her belly, part of him wondering if the weight will crush the tiny thing. They are resting in the tatters of their new house, on a shitty mattress that is harder than either of them felt in their life.

Marina rolls her eyes. “Didn’t know you were a doctor. We haven’t even been to the doctor once.”

“Our great grandmothers did it and so can we,” Nano kisses the knuckles of her hand. She doesn’t need to tell him that she’s still afraid. They’re both afraid. They both want this life that the two of them made together.

“I want a name starting with N,” she mutters, “Or G. If it’s a boy, maybe he can take my brother’s name. He actually gave a shit about me.”

“I give a shit about you. And you’re his sister, he isn’t a hero for giving the bare minimum.” He reaches up and kisses her on the mouth. Her hands are rougher now, calloused from their work in the fields. The dirt of potatoes and the scabs from slipped rocks detract nothing from her. He never wanted her for her softness, never wanted her for her kindness or her purity or anything. He just wanted her.

“I loved him. He loved me. Maybe we can make it a middle name.”

“I still think it’s a girl. Nydia might work. Or Noela.”

She slides her fingers through his hair, gentle and tender. They have only two rooms in the house, plus a crib for their child to grow in.

Winter also brings snow. They spend Christmas wrapped up around the Christmas tree with his mouth against her neck in the vain hope of keeping warmth in her veins. She relies on a dealer in Mostar to give her tri-monthly prescriptions. Nano hopes they’re all they say they are, because Marina doesn’t have a choice.

The year passes them by, and they buy cattle, and they breed the cattle, and they take what they can get. They take from the earth and try to give what they get. Eventually, Marina is too big to do anything for the two of them. She is still beautiful, but beauty was never what Nano noticed first. She is vulnerable with him, hurting but brave all at once.

It is in the small hours of the Bosnian summer that she has their baby. She is sweaty and crying and so, so alone. Nano is again reminded that she can never be his, that she must always be alone in the pain that bears out from her body.

Her head falls back against his shoulder and she cries harder, the tatters of her voice calling for something that sounds like ‘Mother’.

It is a nightmare, and they are oh so unprepared. When their daughter is born, there is no guide to tell them how to look after her. They can only use the common sense of millennia that gives only the barest hint of what they should do.

They name her Nikola and hope that it is a name of strength. She is dark like her father, but smaller than he ever thought a person could be. And she’s a person, she is, a person that they will raise with autonomy and the strength to survive in this hidden world that they made all on their own.

Nano wonders of the future, if they will one day reach back into the place they left. If Marina will see her brother in a crowded Madrid street. He wonders if he will ever again hold his brother in his arms, or if his brother will never again be able to see Nano without hearing Marina’s name in his ear.

All they have is each other. And if they think too long, Nano starts to hurt. Marina pushes on ceaselessly with the thing she has called freedom. Nano watches her go.


End file.
